Required Reading: Handmade Home by Mark and Sally Bailey

Mark and Sally Bailey, owners of the destination housewares store Baileys Home and Garden in the UK, have made a career of repurposing found objects (in fact, they were at it long before it was fashionable). In their latest book, Handmade Home (Ryland Peters & Small, 2011), the couple offers advice on how to bring handcrafted pieces such as ceramics, textiles, and art into the home to create a distinctive environment reflecting the interests of the inhabitants. Using their own home as well as the homes of friends as exemplars, they show how the imperfect and mundane can be celebrated, whether it be driftwood used as pegs or wobbly edged bowls displayed in a wabi-sabi tableau. As Sally Bailey says, "It’s great to see people honoring the handcrafts and acknowledging the importance of where they came from. Long may it last."